For all the readers of this blog - - My time with Typepad is gone now, and I want to thank all of you who visited here regularly. You can follow me - and view my post history from Typepad - on my new Wordpress blog, also entitled Gridley Fires. Continue reading

Harper’s Magazine, October 2012 When both Presidential candidates agree that there’s a lot riding on the 2012 election cycle, and a magazine like Harper’s Monthly spends most of its editorial capital the month before voting day on election related articles, you have to believe things have reached some sort of... Continue reading

For all who downloaded my novella, The Blue Bicycle, yesterday, a most heartfelt thanks for your interest. I hope you're enjoying the read, and please pass along this offer to your reading friends. It's open until 11:59 pm, Pacific Standard Time, October 6th. It's available at this location. Continue reading

My novella, The Blue Bicycle, will be offered for FREE in e-book form, October 5th and 6th. Download it from Amazon onto your Kindle or other e-reader, and have a great, realaxing weekend. Continue reading

I'm discovering, especially with historical fiction, that this is a talent unto itself, and it concerns many challenges. First, the temptation is to make a historical treatise of it, but this isn't what fiction is all about. For such a story to be readable and relevant, the characters must be there, must bring the story, which can seem overarching and distant from a historical perspective, down to the personal level. Continue reading

Auster gives you some of that, but what stands out to you is the writing: the fluid, run-on style in which sentences can last half a page, paragraphs that go on interminably, but without boring, without allowing your mind to wander, making use of the first person tool of "you" instead of the usual "I,"which has that distancing feeling that a memoir deserves. A style with an affinity for lists (places he's lived, sweets he's eaten), a running rivulet of emotions regarding family, lovers, places he's been, people - good and bad - he's been related to or otherwise known. Continue reading

Fuller was born near-blind. Consequently he had to use his tactile sence to relate to early schoolwork. While we were all using building blocks (Leggos, maybe) to construct in a fledgling way what turns out to be a most inefficient and irrational reality, Fuller's tectile sense was creating things from triangles that were far more sound and efficient than our "square" cartesian world. Continue reading

Amazon has eight Kindle Serials for sale so far. In some cases, it’s tapping authors who’ve previously published books with Amazon Publishing. (“I got the gig because Thomas & Mercer picked my previous novel, Jewball, off the KDP self-publishing pile, and we all got along,” Neal Pollack, the author of a Kindle Serial called “Downward-Facing Death,” wrote in the book’s online forum.) Three are from a startup called Plympton. The company was cofounded by former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8 Lee and novelist Yael Goldstein Love. For the three titles, Amazon paid Plympton up front for a licensing deal that includes digital, print and audio world rights for a limited time.
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One site that's growing in popularity is Smashwords, and their site has a presentation on the growing emergence of e-books. Some of its pertinent points, some of which you may want to take exception to, particularly if you have a distinct love for the print book:
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Years later, I discovered the Synergetics books of R. Buckminster Fuller (inventor of the geodesic dome and the dymaxion car). btw,I don't suggest reading them unless you have a lot of Excedrin for the ensuing headaches. Just suffice it to say that Fuller's work did lay out the basis (still accepted by almost no one in the technical disciplines) I'd been looking for. Continue reading

Paul Krugman is a Nobel laureate in economics, a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton, and a provocative columnist at the New York Times since 1999 with over 850,000 Twitter followers. He is also a bestselling author, most recently of End This Depression Now. Writers like Krugman are prized in the world of publishing -- possessing gravitas, while remaining sound investments because of their substantial popularity. The future of their work serves as a bellwether for the industry. Continue reading

I've just finished a second major edit on a medieval novel, tentatively entitled Gerbert's Book, about three primary characters, two real, one fictional, living around the turn of the first millennium. Gerbert and Otto are the two real ones, Zosimus the fictional one. The fictional character is ...

The story is of a young man, Stephen Daedalus who, as we all have probably been in our youth, was subjugated to family, school, and religion. And in this era of Ireland’s history, these constitute a formidable albatross. I’m synopsizing to a great degree, but Daedalus’ first onus is a rather formal Catholic education, in which discipline is paramount. The school’s rules are an end unto themselves. Continue reading

I've been thinking again (I do that once in a while)...literature, i.e., novels, short stories, poetry, memoirs, essays, et. al., shouldn't be consumable products, something you read and throw away. Continue reading

I picture my process as something similar to that of a sculptor's - I block out the story first (the outline), and then do the rough sculpting (initial draft). The following edits are mostly adding a word here, a sentence there, perhaps a paragraph there, to make the story and the characters resonate with details in ever-sharper relief (as does as sculptor). Continue reading

Amazon has fired a shot at Apple’s with two new Kindle products: the Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD. This first-look review pits what we know of both Kindle products against Apple’s current iPad offering, along with how they will fare against a cheaper, smaller, iPad mini that Apple is rumoured to be announcing in October.
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Bourne movies are all rife with backstory, and in this one, in which Jeremy Renner takes over the Bourne role, we discover that part of his discombobulated past has to do with having been a U.S. Army soldier amped up (and befuddled) by "chems," these to make him more physically agile and strong and more mentally alert and flexible. The plot throws Bourne together with Rachel Wiesz as Marta Shearing, the chem whiz who had a lot to do with Bourne's plight. Continue reading

This particular issue (Lee Gutkind, the editor, usually assigns a theme to each issue and advertises it several months ahead) deals with the subject of true crime, even with the ethics of writing about crime. Why ethics, you ask? The issue’s roundtable discussion on the subject deals with that circuitously, but a lot of the concern has to do with romanticizing criminal acts. Continue reading